Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Complicated expressions popped up on Li Jialing’s face as he mumbled, “It does make sense, but… why do I feel that what Brother Yao said made sense, what Sister Long said made sense, and even what Blackstar the Great said made sense too? You are all right. I-I’m completely confused!”

“That’s why I said that you are still too immature and need more personal experiences.”

Li Yao said, “Besides, in many cases, if you are merely talking, even the most bizarre reasons can be decorated flawlessly, but what actually matters is what you do and how you put them into practice.

“I admit that the situation at the center of the cosmos is chaotic, and that the ideas of the Cultivators look rather obsolete. But it is exactly because of the chaotic situation and the balance of Blackstar the Great, the four Kurfürsten, and the Covenant Alliance that we can take the opportunity and rise!

“If it were five hundred years ago when the Imperium of True Human Beings was still relatively united and steady, we would be really hopeless!

“Therefore, give some credit to Brother Yao and the path of the Cultivators. Trust me, I am best at taking advantage of chaos!”

Li Jialing hesitated for a long time but still nodded his head. Not giving a straight answer, he simply said, “I will remember what Brother Yao said. In any case, I am definitely not a coward!”

Right then, the two of them suddenly heard intermittent but rhythmed voices far away from the town. Somebody seemed to be singing a weird tune.

Slightly dazed, the two of them looked at each other and listened quietly, only to realize that the young and vigorous voices were from the kids who were playing on the mainframe crystal processor a moment ago.

Having never breathed such fresh air before, the children showed more intense reactions from the “oxygen intoxication” than the adults did. They clapped their hands and sang ancient rhymes while giggling. Perhaps the children born in the Star Ocean Imperium ten thousand years ago, who were the ancestors of everyone today, might’ve sung exactly the same song in their momentary joy, didn’t they?

Narrowing his eyes, Li Yao listened for a while and remarked, “Very pleasant, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

In a trance, Li Jialing said in a low voice, “When I was little, I spent every second in training and fighting. I never had any chance to sing any song.”

Li Yao said, “You will have children someday, chubby and lovely kids. Do you want them to live in a world without light and rhymes?”

After a long silence, Li Jialing gradually clenched his fists and said, “Brother Yao, let’s go and see what the wildlings living in the areas of darkness and death look like.”

After checking the assets they were to bring with them and confirming the map of the complicated tunnels and gaps, Li Yao and Li Jialing passed a long channel and opened the rusted gate of the shelter while a few fully-armed sentinels observed them, entering the wilderness.

The moment they left the ancient shelter, they immediately discovered that the temperatures had risen by dozens of degrees. The air was soggy and stagnant, enshrouding them in invisible magma that might melt them into parts of the colorful rocks at any moment.

There were countless tunnels outside of the shelter that led to every direction up and down. Li Yao touched the wall of the tunnels, finding that it was smooth, unnatural, and had traces of manual work. There were also helical whorls on it, suggesting that all the tunnels had been dug by enormous excavators and shield tunneling machines a long, long time ago.

Li Jialing and Li Yao said that when the Demon Beast Empire and the Star Ocean Imperium collapsed, countless demons and Cultivators escaped to the underground world. They naturally carried a lot of large magical equipment for the underground environment, of which excavators and shield tunneling machines were certainly the key.

At that time, nobody hoped to be stranded in a shelter in loneliness. All the refugees had ambitious plans, hoping to dig countless tunnels with the excavators and shield tunneling machines and connect all the shelters so that they could reestablish an enormous “underground empire”.

Perhaps they partly succeeded at the beginning. The force made of hundreds of shelters could exchange resources and information as much as possible, thus continuing the civilization from the ground.

But good days did not last. Very soon, the regime of the demons and that of the Cultivators discovered each other. A bloody, incessant war immediately began. The Cultivators at that time had just passed the thirty thousand years of the Great Dark Age, and they still held larger-than-life hatred against demons. The demons, having just lost their country and their lineages, would never concede either.

The brutality of the war must’ve been a hundred times crueler than the battle to besiege “Starlight” below the ground of the Land of Sins. Deep below the surface of the planet, where there was a shortage of all resources, including sunlight and water, it was inevitable that nobody could win the war.

The tunnels of demons and those of humans met and collided together. The excavators of the two parties drilled through the enemy’s skulls, their tracks crushing over the enemy’s bones. The gigantic shield tunneling systems with a hundred discs could’ve dug out a bright future, but they only shattered the enemy’s civilization as well as their own in the end.

Ten thousand years later, the civilization of the past was almost gone, and the only things left were the twisted tunnels and the abandoned shelters, as well as the dead bodies at the corners which had decayed into ashes, telling the brutality of the war in silence.

Li Jialing told Li Yao that, because of the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the past ten thousand years, most of the tunnels had been twisted and deformed into dead ends.

The destination of many tunnels was a forsaken shelter, in which there was nothing but bones and ashes. Anything with the slightest worth had been ransacked.

Only a few of the tunnels led to the caves deeper into the ground that were barely suitable for the survival of living creatures. Those caves were mostly gigantic bases that were supposed to be super towns accommodating the refugees’ civilization, but they were the habitats for the wildlings and the animals now.

Long Yangjun had spent a long time in this place. She explored all the tunnels and natural cracks near the 10,084th district and drew them into a 3D map that had been imported into Li Jialing’s portable crystal processor. Together with the localization chip that could report her coordinates in real time, they were not worried that they could lose their way.

Those tunnels were the “underground highways” that connected different shelters. Naturally, they were not small at all but at least three meters in diameter, broad enough for a fully-armed warrior in a crystal suit to pass by. So, it was not too hard to push forward.

Li Yao and Li Jialing were both capable of a lot of techniques. Although there was no light, and the air was hot and pungent, they were still moving fast.

Even though the tunnels had been torn apart by earthquakes, leaving only zigzagging, narrow gaps, they could also change the structures of their bones and muscles and squeeze through. Since the wildlings were able to move through the gaps, they couldn’t have been too narrow and twisted.

Soon enough, the lights of the 10,084th district completely disappeared into the darkness. They seemed to have walked into the rocks that nobody had ever entered since the primeval age. They heard absolutely nothing in the utter silence. As a result, the sounds of the organ movements inside the body and the running blood were much clearer than before. Even every breath became as deafening as thunders.

This place was exactly the areas of darkness and death that were often frequented by the wildlings.

The two of them released their spiritual energy and sensed the crevices carefully, discovering a lot of creatures that could only be found at such a depth below the ground.

There was a creature that looked like moss but had a tiny umbrella on the head growing in the hottest areas inside the crevices. What was most bizarre was that their umbrellas would release orange brilliance during a bloom, like tiny lanterns.

Li Jialing told Li Yao that the creature similar to moss was known as “Fire Flower” by the locals and could be traced back to the primeval age hundreds of thousands of years ago. They were likely to be an experimental life created by the Pangu civilization or the Nuwa civilization because natural-born creatures rarely had its bizarre characteristics.

The Fire Flowers fed on heat. They would even join each other in clusters, forming carpets that could slither forward, while they chased after magma like herding livestock.

Their body structure was naturally not strong enough for them to survive the magma without being damaged, but whenever the magma slightly cooled down and consolidated, it would immediately become their most succulent prairie. Tremendous Fire Flowers would enshroud the cooling magma and absorb the heat inside without leaving out a single drop.

The Fire Flowers were at the bottom level of the underground ecological system as the food of countless insects and reptiles, supporting the entire complicated plaza of food chains. Also, by absorbing heat on a large scale, they significantly reduced the temperature of the environment, allowing the wildlings to manage to survive. More importantly, after absorbing sufficient heat, the Fire Flowers could also unleash abundant visible light, which was a prerequisite for the underground plants to conduct photosynthesis. Only through such an amazing reaction could the carbon dioxide be absorbed and transformed into indispensable oxygen.

However the wildlings evolved, it was impossible for them to change into anaerobic lives that did not require oxygen at all. In other words, the whole underground ecological system would collapse abruptly without the Fire Flowers.

It was said that a lot of best scholars of the Imperium of True Human Beings tried to figure out the mysteries of the Fire Flowers too. Such a simple-structured and ancient-looking fungus seemed to be a transitional form between life and non-life that had been carefully refined by the primeval civilizations such as Pangu and Nuwa. The enigmas about them were too sophisticated for human beings to understand at this moment.